Thoughts on Marriage

I listened to the intro to Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert on audiobook at work a few days ago. Elizabeth talks about how she'd been a "men's writer" and she'd been told she "writes like a man" and it was meant as a compliment. She wrote a book called Eat, Pray, Love, which was about her divorce. A best seller, she was then a "chicklit" writer and it was "not a compliment." 

I've been reading wedding books a lot recently, having been fool enough to be railroaded into an engagement late last year. Don't misunderstand, I love the man, but I despise the institution of marriage. My mother has been married 4 and a half times, the half being a several year engagement which she had an on/off feeling for and the final marriage being to the same patient man. My father has been married twice with two serious engagements which never finalized. My mother's parents married once and stayed that way. My father's father was a multiple divorcee and something of a playboy and my father's mother married once and gave it a rest. My husband's parents, I thought, would understand my trepidations, having witnessed all the lingering pain and damage these legal wars have wrought upon my family. His adopted father has been divorced once and his mother claims one marriage, but multiple not-marriages, resulting in her two children. I was gravely mistaken.

My husband (we are now legally bonded) and I have known each other for a while. Kinda. Five years my senior, we were never in the same classes, often not even the same schools, but we tended to live near one another during the same periods of time. When my mother decided she was going to sell everything and move to Florida the summer before my third grade year, and moving us to my grandmother's house near Lake Thunderbird for six months while she did long distance interviews and eventually gave up, my future husband was living off of 36th street and Alameda. When I was living in Live Oak apartments near the Frisbee golf course a few years later, he was living in the "project" housing which backed up to the park. When I was in high school, we met at the local comic book store, though I don't think we said much. In late August of 2008, he sends me a message on a social networking site. I'd just been dumped by my fiancé, was recovering from a concussion, was canceling my plans to move to Colorado to be with said ex, was thinking I might move to Nebraska, was definitely not looking for another engagement. We go on one tentative date and his mother tells me to marry him.

She's not going to cause any trouble at all. Neither am I. Fat chance.

 

He proposes sometime in August of 2009, though we've been talking about our wedding for several months already. I want a long engagement. I want him to finish his degree. I want to have my back surgery. I want us to have ten grand in savings when we go on the honeymoon so in case our cruise boat crashes off the coast of Chile, we can have a nice backpacking tour or something and not scramble for money. I sign the marriage license in October of 09 because we know we're getting married anyway and the wedding's going to be in another state and this just makes it easier. He gets laid off in November, a week before Thanksgiving, and we've been fighting with Unemployment ever since. His sister decides she's sick of being badgered by his mom too and declares her wedding date in December. Their aunt takes charge and tramples on everything Sis wanted and somehow manages to spend more than ten grand. They pick dresses that ignore the weather and shoes that I swear were sown with barbed wire. We spend money we don't have on the damn things. We go, it's pretty, the reception is supposed to be high formal I guess but ends up alienating most of the audience and most of us leave as soon as cake is served, and no one gets their "thanks for participating in the wedding party" gifts. And I think, "Dear god I don't want my wedding to be like that."

 

For three months, one fiscal quarter, I've been a wife. I'm still planning a wedding. I still get outrageous ads from bridal boutiques and emails from local DJ's. I haven't and refuse to change my name, much to the confusion of his family, sorry, his side of the family. Hardly matters anyway since they don't spell my first name right and still call me by his last name. For one and a half months, my husband has been a stay at home hubby. I get up early for work and come home in the early afternoon and am continually disappointed in the housework, the groceries, and his hygiene. I'm looking for a second job. I've got the education and experience and why on Earth did we think I could stop working in a few months to get that surgery and things would be ok?

 

Since Sis's wedding, I've marveled at their choice of Bible verses. Each verse highlights the purpose of marriage to create an independent family, beholden to neither side's parents. Since hubby's discharge date, I've marveled...and I'm trying not to criticize here...much...at the unapologetic lack of fiscal principle displayed by my new family. With their encouragement, we now have new debt which could have bought my car. Or financed a small movie. And I wonder if my hubby realizes that the credit cards are at an end and we still have bills that will need paying next month. More now, in fact. I've shown him our budget many times. He knows how little my paychecks are. Sure, some of that was necessary- our car tags, the vet bills, groceries, and gas (even though the last two are generally "no no's" in my book). Comic books, movies, "stupid wedding stuff," Christmas gifts, eating out, and I don't even know what else...It's not a good start.

 

I've heard other stories like this and they don't end well either.

Say Goodbye to Overdraft Protection

On October 19, Senator Christopher Dodd (D, CT) of the Senate Banking Committee, proposed a bill to limit the amount and number of overdraft charges banks can charge customers. On Friday of last week, the Federal Reserve adopted a portion of that proposal regarding ATM and debit purchases, issuing it as a new rule while waiting for the rest of the bill to go through the legislative process.Today, the Fed has extended that rule,initially targeting ATM and debit card purchases, to include gift cards.

Dodd's bill is supposed to limit the charges a bank issues to customers due to using overdraft protection. Overdraft protection is a "courtesy" of the bank- When an item is presented for payment from a customer's account when the customer does not have funds to cover the item, the bank will pay the item plus a fee up to a predetermined limit, operating as an item-by-item short term loan. Fees are incurred per item paid and some banks have 'negative balance fees,' fees that are typically incurred daily for having a negative balance. The portion the Fed is adopting makes it illegal for banks to charge OD charges on ATM and debit card uses, two areas that are commonly used in kiting. Sure, it's stupid to get a $69 charge (from some banks) for a $.90 debit purchase, but overdraft charges are a significant part of a bank's income, regardless of the bank's size (though I have noticed smaller regional banks charge less than national banks).

In proposing this legislation, Senator Reed said that "most people never asked for overdraft protection and logically assume they can only spend the money they have," Reed said. "(This act gives) consumers more choices and (prohibits) banks from levying excessive, hidden fees on individuals and families who are struggling to keep their homes and jobs." When I worked the call center for my bank, 70% of the calls were about overdraft protection, to make sure they had it, and occasionally how to use it. As part of the Truth in Savings Act, banks are required to give customers a list of fees that could appear on their account, including Overdraft charges. Customers are required to sign a form stating they received the Truth in Savings Act. It is assumed by the bank that people want overdraft protection because no one wants to have a bill returned unpaid. If an account is opened WITHOUT Over Draft, the bank representative tells the customer. However, it has been agreed in my office that making an "opt-in" form at account opening detailing the rules of overdraft is a good idea and probably should have been enacted long ago.

The Senate bill limits the number of times a bank can charge for overdraft protection to 6 times per year, no more than once a month. This does NOT limit the times a customer can overdraw their account. As the Oklahoma Banking Association points out, "in some states – like Oklahoma – writing a check 'with the intent to cheat and defraud' a person, firm or entity and 'obtain . . . money, property or valuable thing' is a crime: a misdemeanor if the check is less than $500, and a felony if it exceeds that amount." The bill also limits the amount the bank can charge for overdrafts to "'proportional' to the cost of processing the overdraft," meaning that small banks will still charge smaller fees overall than big banks.

In my office, we are supposed to mitigate the losses of the bank and this bill is a big deal. For us, it means that we will probably no longer offer Overdraft protection because it will represent a loss to the bank (roughly 30% of revenue in some areas we cover). Alternatives have been proposed, such as a revolving loan, predetermined at the time of account opening, an "opt in," where a customer would choose how many or to what amount of check or ACH items they want paid if they do not have enough money to cover it in their account with a proportional fee charged either monthly or bimonthly, and simply not having overdraft at all. Returned check charges are in limbo- technically they aren't part of overdraft because they are a processing fee which is usually covered by a customer's account gaining the bank interest by simply having money with the bank, but the wording of the bill seems to include them. The OBA states, "Apparently they don't understand that there are at least two costs involved whenever a check "bounces" and is honored: one is for processing the item itself, and the other is for advancing the funds to cover the check." Return check charges are simply covering the processing cost.


As for debit and ATM cards, we've discussed some long needed changes and the Fed's new rule has made our discussions just in time.

Debit card transactions are likely to change drastically and not just from your bank: merchants are going to have to change the way they run cards too. Remember getting a $1 preauthorization from your gas pump? Preauthorizations will likely be for the maximum allowance for hotels, rental cars, and any purchase where the amount authorized could be different than the amount charged (like when you eat out and put a tip on your receipt) because authorizing banks will not be willing to authorize a charge that may overdraw your account because they will take the loss. Currently at my bank, a preauthorization shows up the day it is done and then falls off the account. After all, there is no guarantee that a preauthorization will lead to a real charge. This will likely change so that the preauthorization stays on the account unless and until the merchant puts through the "hard" charge or cancels the invoice.

ATM's...Well...The nation's ATM networks are a joke. The majority of ATM's seem to be based on a design from the 1970's or 80's, "stand alones" use a telephone line to dial their clearing house to do a simple verification, ie, "Will this charge clear this account?" and foreign ATM's (ATM's that are not owned by the same bank that you are transacting with) usually don't get any account information outside of verification (not even account balance unless a second transaction is initiated, which gets a second foreign ATM fee). We like the idea of having a pop up that tells customers that doing this transaction will overdraw their account, just like a real teller is supposed to do over the counter. Having ATM's use a secured internet connection is both cool and very risky. Installing alarms on ATM's so that they alert local authorities when they are "tampered" with will also help prevent further ATM losses due to skimmers and stolen debit/ATM cards.

Response to Orson Scott Card

I recently reread an essay by Orson Scott Card titled “Are We the End of Science Fiction?" Just last week, I went to the movies and saw Surrogates, and haven’t been able to shut up about how happy I was with the science fiction involved. Sure, the plot was kinda predictable and the murder mystery was just an excuse to examine the human condition, but that’s what science fiction is supposed to do! Yes, Mr Card, we are not the end of science fiction, but the precipice of reevaluation.

I know, it’s irksome to go to the bookstore and hunger for a book that is truly sci-fi and have to dig through masses of sword and sorcery, books barely a step away from bewitching bodice rippers, and fifteen different types of media spin offs (Star Trek, Star Wars, World of Warcraft, World of Darkness, D&D and so many others). I picked up a hopeful by the name of Whitechapel Gods, which seemed to be a steam-punk book based on the summary, but quickly found myself in a fantasy involving human machines, not a shred of science to be found. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of story. It would definitely highlight the human condition. But I wasn’t able to get past the betrayal of expectations. The same thing happened with A Brief History of the Dead. A marvelous opportunity to examine our fears at the most basic level, with twists on science and socio-political theory…thwarted by the writer’s intent to write a survival tragedy with sci-fi trimming. And if you need to call that much attention to foreshadowing…but he must have done something right since his book was on the New York Time’s Best Sellers list for a while.

As much as it pains me, Card is right that fantasy is crowding out science fiction. Sci-fi is, as he puts it, too involved for most readers now. They need to observe and think about the world they are experiencing. I saw Surrogates with a friend from work. During the drive home, I started talking about the science- would the Surries correct color blindness and how would the human know since his/her brain had never experienced those colors before? Would the color I see finally be provable as the same the color you see since our optics are set to an industry standard or would we still have the theoretical misinterpretation of the brain? What about eating? If I had a food allergy, could I have my Surry eat something for me just so I could experience it? What if I have seizures? How come Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, the internet, and a life monitoring system aren’t included with Surries? My friend is a full time mom and part time gardener. She gave me a blank look and said, “I liked the story. I don’t know about the science. I don’t have time to think like that anymore!”

And it got me thinking. I had thought, the first time I read Card’s article, maybe a year or more ago, that the problem with writing science fiction now is that the science is always changing. I keep up with science magazines and the articles argue back and forth over so many topics that if I start writing about, say, a society that uses black holes as an energy source because they emit radio waves which can possibly do such and such (utopic/distopic sci fi), by the time I get to a finished draft in six months to a year, there will be an article about a brand new study that says that black holes DON’T emit radio waves, but cause vibrations in the dark matter field, thus debunking my “science.” And popular science hasn’t truly made it into scifi either. Why can’t my android secretary update her Twitter account while she’s being “murdered?” I mean, beyond the fact that she doesn’t know she’s an android and doing a constant upload of data?

Science has gotten to the point that magic is more believable. For some reason, our popular conscience (haha) finds that having witches and wizards building a conspiracy to keep Mundies like us from noticing how amazingly scary cool their world is even as it intersects our own is more reasonable. Maybe it has something to do with this “debate” about how “real” science is- after all evolution is only a theory that’s been proven with birds, peas, dogs, cats, fish, and other lower life forms that aren’t human. I mean, humans aren’t evolving are we? Oil of Olay has a commercial out that says that it protects my skin’s DNA and humans aren’t evolving. But I’ll totally believe in ghosts, angels, demons, and the power of my friend Will to overcome physical reality. Philosophically real reality.
But real science is changing every day.

If, as Card says, sci-fi is about exploring and preparing ourselves for the changes that science makes in our day to day lives, and I think it is, then science fiction is more important than ever. But it’s more than that. Science Fiction is supposed to help us stay human and recognize the humane in technology. There was an article on Wired.com around December of last year that talked about violence against Tickle Me Elmo. Does violence against a life like object desensitize us to violence against living creatures? If I kill an AI, does it count as murder? The first question was posed by the writer at Wired; I could draw correlations between “life like objects” being treated humanely and the studies being done with autistic persons via face recognition software that may answer that. The second question is purely theoretical right now but as we move toward a society that interacts with creations that mimic life to the point that we can’t tell the difference it will become important and be put to our lawmakers: Macintosh vs. Wade anyone? There’s already been a case where someone has “murdered” another by deleting their SecondLife character and followed up by murdering the real person.

There has never been a human time without human imagination. As long as we keep trying to understand our place in the world, the natural that exists without us and the social economic political network we have created, there will be something like science fiction. But we as science fiction writers need to do service to ourselves and imagine things that will be useful to our society. We aren’t going to get the science right- it is rare that we predict the future in that sense. But we have predicted human nature and we need to draw attention to that so we can get the minds of the world thinking again.

When Last...

When last I wrote, we had just found out that my grandmother had cancer on her kidney. I have been taking time off from writing so I could be with her. She had surgery a few days after my last post and was released from the hospital the day after. She's been at home recovering since. Two weeks ago, she got a small cold, otherwise I probably would have started writing again sooner.

Other big developments- Hoyt and I have decided to go a head and get the marriage liscence stuff taken care of next week rather than next year. September has been riddled with "heavy discussions" and anxiety for both of us and I think we will both be comforted in knowing that the other can hold us for legal ransom very soon.

Busy Week So Far

I've been pretty busy this week working on building up my Examiner.com profile. I got off track and did some unplanned work- a partial review of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency proposal (Senate version; haven't finished reading the House one) and finished a quick proposal on how to live on minimum wage, something most of us have done at least once.

Other projects to finish this week- SMS Phishing on the rise, and work on some short stories and other fiction, finish with the House version of CFPA (which so far has been friendlier to the financial industry than the Senate one, but still has vague definitions which could allow broad applications and drastic changes), and do some table top gaming! Hooray for L5R and Modern D20!

We did get to watch the new Harry Potter yesterday- Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It made me realize how long it's been since I've read the books. The movie was beautiful and followed enough of the ideas of the book that I didn't find anything too jarring. I've had some fun "at work" talks about the cannonized shipping; I thought that had finally died. I will admit that Ms Watson and Mr Radcliffe seem to have a better on screen chemistry than Ms Watson and Mr Grint, but that's just the way some things are.

Two of the coolest things this week were me accidently doing my post on CFPA the same day that Rachel Maddow had a segment on it and Thomas Zahler, writer and artist of Love and Capes, announcing that he has completed the final drafts for his wedding edition comic book cover, which fiance and I will be on. Mr Zahler said in his announcement email that, "The official reveal for te cover is....for the PopCandy blog on the USA Today site, scheduled for next Friday."

Fusion Fall

Hoyt and I tried Cartoon Network's MMO over the weekend, Fusion Fall. Fusion Fall is a browser based MMO, so it doesn't require any disks or downloads, unlike most MMORPGS. Another great thing offered by the game is the "family" account- which has multiple (4) individual accounts tied to one billing and login account. The game currently offers
a free account type, which has limited leveling, item use, and item aquisation. The price for the game isn't that high either, with a normal account billing at $5.95 a month and a family account at $9.95 monthly.

The game brings back many of Cartoon Network's favorites- Dexter, The Kids Next Door, Samurai Jack, The Power Puff Girls, and more, for the Player to interact with. The voice actors are all present, which makes character dialouge simply a joy to hear. The animation
and graphic style is a generic and clean anime style, rather like the Digimon series.

While I like the game generally, with clear story expectations and mission tracking (it has a Quest Helper built in to the interface) I found myself frustrated with the primary method of movement, which is mouse based. Unlike most MMO's, this isn't optional and there is no "point and click" function of the mouse unless you move to the options screen, the same screen used for in game chatter. So for someone like me, who keeps a few programs going in the back ground, as well as text messenger, the only way to switch between programs is to hit enter, which brings up the game's options and automatically starts the chat window. This also means that the game is entirely auto-target, no selecting your target. If you want to target the monster on the right, you have to make sure it's centered in your screen and the auto-target system has selected the target and isn't stuck on a different monster. The good news is that the monsters don't appear to have an Aggro range; they only attack once engaged. To attack, you click the mouse and no auto-continue on attacks. I found, after some digging, that the game is built to be compatible with play on the XBox 360, for which these control issues wouldn't be a problem.

The game also doesn't appear to offer specailty classes; everyone can use everything and has the same fighting styles. I didn't see anything indicating a healing class (my favored class in just about everything I've ever played), but after the first hour or so, I wanted to move back into a more complicated world. Again, I like the world, and will probably continue playing, but I can't see myself quitting my WOW account or paying the otherwise reasonable fee for an unlimited account.

A Good Time to Save

Now that the heat of summer has is in full effect and dreams of Christmas in July have gone, many local stores are doing their best to remind patrons that Fall is just around the corner. Walmart hasn't quite put up their Christmas decorations yet...

What they really want to know is, "Have you started saving for Christmas?"

While it's true that banks are not offering the best interest rates right now (average of local banks in the Norman area is around 0.5%), now is a good time to start a savings account, or start seriously contributing to the one you have, and keep contributing throughout the year.
The third quarter earnings are going to be very high for a lot of regional banks, which have been benefiting from the record low mortgage rates and strong feelings of insecurity and distrust in national bank chains, which will push up interest rates on all deposit items (savings accounts, money markets, and CDs). These reports will be released internally by the end of October and externally in November, usually in time for Black Friday. August and September are also months when most banks offer specials on some deposit accounts, such as CD's and first time checking accounts for college students.

Many banks offer a "Christmas Club" Savings account, which will only allow deposits until November, when it will either send out a check for the balance of the account, transfer the funds to a pre assigned checking account, or send a out a prepaid Visa. These accounts are separate from normal savings accounts so emergency funds aren't confused with Christmas money. Christmas Savings accounts sometimes have differing interest rates from normal savings accounts, since they function as an 11 month rolling deposit CD.